Usability and Acceptability of the Sahana Situational-Awareness Platform in Myanmar, Maldives, and the Philippines

Abstract

Maldives, Myanmar, and the Philippines are vulnerable to natural disasters. Sendai Framework of Action calls for risk reduction by implementing early warning systems (Zia and Wagner, 2015). A prevailing challenge is for authorities to coordinate warnings across disparate communication systems and autonomous organizations (Smith and Bunker, 2009). Cross-Agency Situational-Awareness platforms and the ITU-T X.1303 Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) interoperable data standards presents themselves as solution for diluting the inter-agency rivalries and interconnection disparities (Pagotto and O’Donnell, 2012). The CAP-enabled Sahana Alerting and Messaging Broker (SAMBRO) was designed to overcome these issues by providing a Common Operating Picture and a platform for all Stakeholders to share and disseminate early warnings. To that end, the CAP-on-a-MAP project implemented SAMBRO and the CAP standard along with the policies and procedures, recommended by Christian (2016) in the three countries. The project evaluated the usability and acceptability of the intervention through a ‘gulf of evaluation’ complexity analysis method and by applying the ‘technology acceptance model’. The users ‘agreed’ that SAMBRO was ‘useful’ and ‘easy to use’. Moreover, they had ‘quite’ a good attitude towards adopting and indicated that it was beneficial. This paper discusses the outcomes of the evaluation and the policy implications that would allow for sustaining and scaling the concept of cross-agency situational-awareness for improving institutional responsiveness to coastal-hazards in the three countries.

Keywords: Disaster, Innovation, Application, Information, Performance